A new present is always a possibility in a state of becoming | Giovanna Esposito Yussif

“The twilight of the future heralds the advent of the now.”

Octavio Paz

In the current geopolitical situation, the fragility of a present that actively engages with diversity is undeniable. With uusi nykyisyys | new present curators Hamm and Kammanger underline the diversity within the Finnish art scene as a direct comment towards the multiplicity of voices latent in its social fabric. The exhibition also reminds us that an open assessment of plurality is crucial and urgent, allowing us to avoid the limitations of encapsulating diversity solely through the discourses of identity politics and nationalisms.

The following texts commissioned to Maryan Abdulkarim and Pauliina Feodoroff, Sezgin Boynik, Airi Triisberg, and Third Space are part of an attempt to further explore the critical questions that emerged from both the curatorial discourse and the exhibited artistic works. The writers explore the necessity and power involved in owning one’s story to bring forward other narratives and desires (Abdulkarim & Feodoroff); the role of culture in the reproduction of state ideological apparatuses and the urgency to emancipate art from culture (Boynik); what can be learned from the collective struggles against precarious labour and re-imagining art as potential sites for post- and non-capitalist practices (Triisberg); the importance of queer and feminist politics in order to challenge the normative roles that regulate our dwelling and reproduction (Niemelä); and acknowledging the multiplicity within (Third Space; Grey Violet)

A new present is always a possibility in a state of becoming. These possibilities can become alternatives through which to narrate and nurture our futures, reminding us of how easily they can also become silent stories and forgotten pasts.

Giovanna Esposito Yussif (1981) is an art historian and curator based in Helsinki.

Everything around you is a story | Maryan Abdulkarim and Pauliina Feodoroff

See.
Everything around you is a story.

You
will be pierced by thousands of story impulses, experienced,
resistant to ambience, manipulated into you, planted, left for open
interpretation at every moment. You seek them all the time. If no one
has prepared you a story, you do it yourself.

The
story is borne from the fact that there are names. Appoint them. The
Appointment has a story. Where did this come from? How did it come to
be? Why? What is it capable of? And there you have it. When it is
known that it is a fact its potential will start to happen. Then this
happened. And there is a story related to it. It was borne from that.
It led to this. And so we have an entire world, complete worlds. And
to them stories of how they came to be reveal what it consists of.
Why does it consist? What is it?

This
story gives you a guide to the world. The guide is either in the
story or the story. The guide is clear, but it cannot be said more
briefly than the story. It cannot be removed from the story. The
whole idea of the language is in the story. That we can say out loud
what is. Where is. And what is not. What we do not want, that it is.
We can evoke it. We can drive it out. The story is the intellectual
substance that drains from our mouths with the respiration, it is a
sound wave, somewhat heavier than the spirit, it flows through our
hands on the keyboard, paper, stone cave wall. It is a matter in
which our minds understand themselves inside and outside. It is a
matter that accumulates in our minds that we can share, to force, to
steal and recycle each other, for each other, endlessly.

It
is just a travesty, someone else's story, someone that saw you, and
whose story sometimes is tangential to yours. And because their story
exists, it is believed that nothing more is needed. That this be
enough for your story. Someone else's story about you. And you hate
it. Because the canon of your own story is not in your hands. And
since everyone else has a story but you, you start to think that you
are not even worth a story. That you do not have a birth. That your
nonexistence does not serve any purpose. That you have no place,
purpose and mission. That you are not. And alienated from your own
life even further, you disappear into the stories of the others.
Because you cannot trust your own your judgment, because you cannot
trust any of the findings, because they cannot not be, if you do not
have names, which could be related to objective, merge, knit
together. You are not. But, you do exist, even memoryless.

Dodge
your story, quote other stories, learn all of them. Make your
identity the storage place of other stories. You will manage for a
time. And in the end you realise that what could have been your own
story line, the start, has been perfected into other stories, edges
ground into other stories, and it no longer exists. There is no
longer a beginning, birth, cause and a consequence. Whether you're
light as a snowflake? Cultivated man? Or are you a leaking hole,
hole, which sucks in everything in an endless hunger for anything?

The
story. The story can mold realities. The story of what happened a
moment before I entered here, the story of how this object came to
be, the story about how someone has spent a day of their life, or a
year or a decade. The stories have power. Stories shape the realities
and the way we see the world.

My
understanding of myself depends on what stories I am told, what I
believe. Credible stories are those which support the existing story.
The main narrative, which defines the reality. The stories may exceed
the limits that won’t be crossed in the physical existence. Stories
are at the same time very real and untrue, descriptive and yet images
and memories generated by a trace.

The
main story is narrated and edited by those who have power. They say
what they saw and how it felt, how we felt even. This is a story that
is repeated again and again and again. Until we all believe in it and
adapt our memories to fit it. Embrace it and see it as the only
story. The story is strengthened through art, through religion. With
anything. As long as it sells and the masses become believers.

The
story explains the birth of the Earth. The story is about my mother's
childhood. The story is about why we eat as we eat. The stories are
not created in a vacuum. They are generated, nurtured and place in
the world. The story says that having the strongest voice reaches the
most listeners. The story also says that the strongest voice has been
bought, stolen, exported cunningness and an open declaration of war
against the disbelievers.

Stories
have been told for as long as there has been the existence of story
tellers. As long as there has been those who remember. The story is a
description of our memories or imagination. The story of our time
describes god as a straight white male.

Art
comes from these stories, is surrounded by them and is rich with
them. Art, like anything else experienced, is not free of the
realities created through stories. We build realities in each other,
we are looking for ways to break the pattern, and the more we ache to
break them, the more we are stuck in the story. The story teaches us
that there are heroes, there are revolutionaries and there are
pillars of society, and the villains of the story are the
disbelievers. The story tells us what happened to the past
generations. The story is about how to present it. The power and
possibilities of the story as well as its shortcomings and
limitations are in the narrator. The main narrator. Today’s
storyteller.

Maryan Abdulkarim (1982) is ethnically Somali and a Finnish citizen who works as an activist, writer and norm critical educator. Abdulkarim collaborates actively with diverse NGO's and in the field of culture.

Pauliina Feodoroff (1977) is a Skolt Sámi activist, director and writer. She is currently the art director of Rospuutto theatre group and chairwoman of Skolt Sámi culture organization Saa´mi Nue´tt.

*The skolt sámi text was written with the help of Vladimir Feodoroff and Tiina Sanila-Aikio.

Cultural Dead End | Sezgin Boynik

Then
in the year 1504 a terrible fire broke out in Venice, near the Rialto
bridge, in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which was completely burnt out
with all its stocks of merchandise, to the great loss of the
merchants. So the Signoria of Venice decreed that it should be
rebuilt, and this was done very quickly, with far better
accommodation and with greater magnificence, adornment, and beauty.
Meanwhile, in view of Giorgione's mounting reputation, those in
charge of the project, after discussing the matter, ordered that he
should colour it in fresco as he wished, provided only that he did it
all in his power to create a first-rate work, seeing that it was for
the most beautiful place and the finest site in the city. So
Giorgione started work. But he thought only of demonstrating his
technique as a painter by representing various figures according to
his own fancy. Indeed, there are no scenes to be found there with any
order of representing the deeds of any distinguished person, of
either the ancient or the modern world. And I for my part have never
been able to understand his figures nor, for all my asking, have I
ever found anyone who does. In these frescoes one sees, in various
attitudes, a man in one place, a woman standing in another, one
figure accompanied by the head of a lion, another by an angel in the
guise of the cupid; and heavens knows what it all means. Then over
the main door which opens into the Merceria there is the seated
figure of a woman who has at her feet the head of a dead giant, as if
she were meant to be Judith; she is raising the head with a sword and
speaking to a German standing below her. I have not been able to
interpret the meaning of this, unless Giorgione meant her to stand
for Germania (Vasari 1965: 274-5).

In
1967 Carl Andre wrote this statement which I think is the most
precise introduction to the ‘politics’ of conceptual art: “Art
is what we do; culture is what is done to us” (Andre 2005: 30).
This is the best way to introduce the thesis of this article: only
with emancipation from culture can art gain what belongs to herself.
Defining the thing that belongs to art is not the agenda of this
text. Instead, the topic is, what does culture take from art?

In
this current state of affairs, it is art which delegates what usually
belongs to culture: nationalism, leisure, mythology, a feeling of
community, identity, identification, government, and folklore,
amongst other things that have to do with the reproduction of the
prevailing ruling conditions. Or to be more precise, the things which
reproduce the context do not separate the ruler from the ruled. Or to
paraphrase Louis Althusser, we could say that culture reproduces the
conditions of capitalist production based on exploitation of labour
forces. This is reproduction taking place within ideology, operating
as the continuous regeneration of a subject that is supposed to be
ahistorical. This happens in everyday life as well as in exceptional
situations, for example when someone who fights for her bread comes
to understand that there is something which goes beyond the struggle
to feed hungry stomachs. This understanding is embodied in culture.
The context of culture is so great that it can absorb everything,
even the attempt to fight against exploitation, repression and
inequality. We heard and still hear that there is a culture of
working class, proletariat and poor people that have specific likes,
dislikes, hopes, and routines. In this cultural understanding of poor
people’s struggle against exploitation, politics (that is,
collective action against exploitation) is seen as nothing more but
one of the possible expressions of the human condition. The silent
assumption is that regardless of the different attempts to fight
against prevailing and ruling forces, all are doomed to fail because
they are underpinned by a commonality called 'culture' which unites
us as human beings with trivial differences. This is one reason why
projects based on multi-culturalism are conceptually redundant; any
attempt to define, use or apply 'culture' is a way of synchronising
antagonistic pluralisms. Culture works to homogenise—blend and
mash-up—not only different groups that have different expressions,
but also the different expressions and forms in one prevailing and
ruling tendency. Technically, this means that culture absorbs not
only political but artistic struggles and present them as niche.

Pierre
Bourdieu defended this niche as anomalies of tastes and interests.
For example, Bourdieu does not consider the formal, conceptual and
heuristic differences of art tendencies as constitutive of their
practice, but rather as instances of mere strategic anomalies or
niches: “The names of the schools or groups which have proliferated
in recent painting (pop art, minimal art, process art, land art, body
art, conceptive art, arte
povera,
Fluxus, new realism, nouvelle
figuration,
support-surface,
art
pauvre,
op art, kinetic art, etc.) are pseudo-concepts, practical
classifying tools which create resemblances and differences by naming
them” (Bourdieu 1993: 106). According to this ‘sociological’ or
‘cultural’ interpretation of art practice, the difference between
Art & Language and Hans Haacke, or between Eija-Liisa Ahtila and
Black Audio Film Collective, is a mere trifle in the scheme of this
ubiquitous cosmos of culture. It is obvious that my intervention of
writing this is against these simplification and reductionism.

Fredric
Jameson, Marxist theoretician of culture, wants us to imagine this
cultural ubiquity as a kind of explosion: “a prodigious expansion
of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which
everything in our social life—from economic value and state power
to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be
said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet
untheorised sense” (Jameson 1991: 48).

In
the seventies, this unconsidered and automatically absorbed
culturalisation of politics was discussed within the publications of
Birmingham’s infamous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
where it was considered to be an ideological effect of “the
'utopian' substitution of cultural politics for politics proper”
(Jameson 1998: 27). Stuart Hall, a leading theoretician of cultural
studies, (his earlier work, Resistance
through Rituals,
dealt with youth sub-cultural movements) described the omnipresence
of culture in direct relation to the ways in which ideology operated.

It is
precisely its ‘spontaneous’ quality, its transparency, its
‘naturalness’, its refusal to be made to examine the premises on
which it is founded, its resistance to change and to correction, its
effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it
moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time,
‘spontaneous’, ideological and unconscious.
You cannot learn, through common sense, how
things are:
you can only discover where
they fit
into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very
taken-for-grantedness is what establishes it as a medium in which its
own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible
by its apparent transparency. (Hall 1977)

For
Hall and others based in Birmingham, this clarification was crucial
not because they were interested in advocating for the political
language of the times (their efforts largely adhered to abstract
political-Marxist logic that helped clarify their position as
authentically political), but rather because they wanted to be seen
to be challenging the perception that culture was analogous to
politics. They were careful not to identify their struggle with
‘proper’ political engagement and instead framed it as something
like a new expression for new times: a political adjustment for new
cultural tastes. Usually this presents as commodity and consumption
based politics—every newly appearing commodity style (rock, hippy,
punk, disco, yuppie, etc.) finds a new ‘style’ or language of
politics. This was particularly important to Hall and his colleague
Paul Gilroy because they knew that an act of politics should be
understood not only in a terms of the violence and oppression
happening to them as blacks, but more pertinently to them as working
class blacks. Any attempt to delegate that 'violence' to culture and
to seek emancipation from this culture did nothing but hark back to a
familiar understanding of 'culture' that the average Englishman felt
at home with. “. . . all the characteristic activities and
interests of a people. Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of
August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dartboard,
Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in
vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar . . .”
(Eliot 1963) It was this definition of culture put forward by
T.S. Eliot that Hall and his colleagues opposed. They were also aware
that any attempt to save culture via a detour around Eliot would
sooner or later serve the nationalistic purpose of showing the place
to those who are not sure of their whereabouts. Simply, the culture
would embody the banality of barbarism.

It
was not only England who advocated for this homogenous definition of
culture. France too made sense only through the filter of this
high-and-low unity of bourgeois culture embracing all people’s
likes and styles. “The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous
ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our
rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks
about the weather, a trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream
of, the garments we wear, everything in everyday life is dependent on
the representation which the bourgeoisie has
and makes us have
of the relations between men and the world” (Barthes 1972).
Eliot's defence of culture was a reactionary and conservative
position. Today these kinds of anti-industrialist and anti-Marxist
positions of ‘longing for the good old days of living together in a
nice community’ is not different from a classical fascist who calls
the police after seeing a black man from their balcony. There are
unfortunately still many of these types of people. But what is
alarming is that the culture for which Eliot advocated is still
influencing a broad spectrum of minds, from the local restaurant
owner to the most contemporary of art practitioners and
theoreticians.

It
is interesting to look at Clement Greenberg's reading of Eliot's
conservatism. It is known that Greenberg, as an editor of American
left-wing magazine Partisan
Review
and an advocate of formal inquiries into abstract expressionism,
understood well Eliot’s “plight of culture—his notorious
opposition to industrialist kitsch can be seen to be an anti-Marxist
reaction. It was a cultural action against class struggle! But
contrary to Greenberg’s reputation as having a nose for 'new
things', art critic Barbara Reise's text makes clear that Greenberg’s
sole intellectual capital was the anticipation of Jackson Pollock's
market success; once he lost the gamble of predicting the future of
conceptual art, his famous authority was severely diminished.
Greenberg identified that due to the industrial revolution, workers
had more time for leisure and thus more time for culture. In the
vernacular of Eliot, this meant that a ‘new lived religion’ among
the working class was taking shape, which necessitated the emergence
of a new culture. Here is how Greenberg sees things:

“[As
Marx predicted] … With work becoming universal once more, may it
not become necessary—and because necessary, feasible—to repair
the estrangement between work and culture, or rather between
interested and disinterested ends, that began when work first became
less than universal? And how else could this be done but through
culture in its highest and most authentic sense?” (Greenberg 1961:
33).

We
have gone full circle, from work and labour (via a struggle for
bread) to culture as a field of negotiation repairing the bonds of a
scattered society. But as we made this circle, we passed unnoticed
from politics through to art. This was possible because culture has
the capacity to not only unite different political and artistic
forms, but to also to repair the schism between art and politics. The
problem is that when culture does happens unequivocally as culture;
there is no longer any room for art or politics.

This
is why I insist on the emancipation of art from culture. Experimental
filmmaker and theoretician Peter Gidal has written that the gravest
mistake an avant-garde artist could make was to position culture as a
central reference point in their work. Even worse was insisting on
being the centre of their culture—for Gidal this is nothing short
of cultural chauvinism. The usual debate on whether contemporary art
can be nationalistic takes a rather different bent when we switch
this debate to the more refined question of whether there is any
difference between nation and culture?! “European filmmakers are
wary of the structure and ideology which might create the conditions
for cultural imperialism in the area of filmmaking. They are,
therefore, involved in a redefinition of the nature and function of
filmmaking that differs from those of the Americans who are making
their way gradually towards the center of our own culture” (Gidal
1989: 162.)

By
not being at the centre of their own culture, artists refuse to be
part of the ideology of cultural imperialism. But this thesis has
some peculiar difficulties which I have saved for the end. If we say
that the state and the nation’s expansion instrumentalises artistic
creativity as a backup of imperialism—for example as in the thesis
of Serge Guilbaut that posits abstract-expressionism as a cultural
longhand of American economic imperialism during the Cold War—then
we are forced to ask a difficult question regarding the boundaries of
where the art starts and culture ends. This assumes it is possible to
agree upon some geometrical relation between the two that is
disturbed by external political intervention. In analyses made by
conceptual artists this is clearly not the case. There is no
dialectic between culture and art that is mediated by politics. On
the contrary, the cultural invasion of artistic practice is happening
inside and without the state’s intervention. The faction of
conceptual art that included Carl Andre and Art & Language were
considering this question. Andre’s aforementioned statement is more
‘radical’ than his involvement with the Artist Worker’s
Coalition (AWC) struggles for better wages and proper representation
of artists in cultural institutions. Otherwise, the liberal coalition
amongst the various factions of artists that make themselves
available to fight against capitalist repression mimics the same
strange geometry where the boundaries between art and culture are no
longer clear. To say that culture is forced to dictate from the
outside, as Andre claimed, is only one step toward emancipation.
Another step is to face the material effects of this emancipation and
make a break.

Art
& Language understood this as one of the most important questions
for art practices. The reason why they refused to join the AWC ranks
in fighting against capitalism was that this was a liberal coalition
aiming at silencing the real and inherent contradictions of art for
the sake of cultural action. In Mel Ramsden’s text ‘On Practice’,
published in the first issue of The
Fox
in 1974, he insists precisely on this understanding of the ‘practice’
of art as something that works in contradictions. This means that a
claim for the emancipation of art from culture should not necessarily
imply the bourgeois bureaucratic formalism that reduced art practice
to self-approving positivism which Victor Burgin aptly described as
“the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud, the
chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes—all in
the name of timeless aesthetic values’ (Burgin 1976).

The
first point is to challenge the ways we engage with the artwork
itself—the modes of representation, its relation to culture, the
reproduction of prevailing bureaucratic structures, and the existing
ruling norms of ideological relations. Secondly it is crucial for us
to understand that any artwork, even the artworks that claim to be
emancipated from representational culture, are also operating as a
practice within culture. There is no strategy of emancipation from
culture that can also introduce art practices on clean plates. The
difficult work of devising a ‘radical’ break from culture is at
the same time dirty work; the impurity of this practice is what makes
art more complex than any other cultural and ideological
representation. “My point was you just can’t descriptivistically
treat culture as an object of contemplation. It is something you and
I do, not something we discover and then contemplate” (Ramsden
1974: 80).

As
a solution to the shortcomings of Andre’s formalism, in 1973 Art &
Language proposed a correction to his statement with a
counter-statement: “Art is what we do, culture is what we do to
other artists”. It is clear that emancipation from culture is not
something that implies art will ascend to higher and safer spheres,
but instead turns art practice into a combat formalism which works
within ideologies overdetermined by contradictions. For Art &
Language, this was not an easy decision and they knew perfectly well
what it meant to claim that
‘having-your-heart-in-the-right-place-is-not-making-history.’ It
meant that the hearts that call for a culture that ushers forward a
better life in which barbarism or fascism will not have a say, could
also be calling for a better and more bearable fascism. Culture
provides this through all gamuts and tricks. For all those good
bourgeoisie people who are trying to substitute Rosa Luxemburg’s
slogan “socialism or barbarism” with “culture or barbarism”
in the hope of imagining a changed world without antagonisms, I am
ending this text with the last lines of Brecht’s famous poem, The
Interrogation of the Good:

But
in considerationof
your merits and good qualitiesWe
shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot youWith
a good bullet from a good gun and bury youWith
a good shovel in the good earth.

Sezgin Boynik (1977) lives and works in Helsinki. He has completed his Phd in Jyväskylä University Social Science department on the topic of "Cultural Politics of Black Wave in Yugoslavia from 1963 to 1972". He has been publishing on punk, relation between aesthetics and politics, cultural nationalism, Situationist International and Yugoslavian cinema.

Five
years ago I was part of an art workers’ collective in Tallinn,
Estonia, who set out to create a trade union in order to defend the
social and economic rights of precarious cultural workers. This
proved to be a complicated task. Trade unionist politics appear to be
more successful in contexts where production is condensed in space
and time, in contrast to the working conditions of art and cultural
workers which are routinely short-term, intermittent, and dispersed.
Therefore, the main challenge of creating labour unions within the
art field relates to questions of where and when. How to localise
collective struggles when operating from within fragmented working
realities characterised by individualisation and a constant rotation
of workplaces and employers?

The
challenge of organising dispersed workers is obviously not new. It
was an ongoing concern within feminist activism and theory during the
heyday of 1970s trade unionist struggles. In addition to efforts to
identify unpaid reproductive labour as a key resource of capitalist
accumulation, feminist politics strived to expand the location of
working-class struggle beyond its privileged site of the factory.
This ambition corresponded with the newly developed concept of
“social factory” that emerged in autonomist Marxist theory in the
1970s. It suggested that the Fordist mode of production is a social
system that reaches far beyond the walls of factory to also include
the unwaged workers of capitalist society. Nevertheless, the feminist
agenda of organising wageless domestic workers did not easily fit
into the matrix of trade unionist strategies. For example, major
difficulties emerged when feminist activists tried to mobilise
domestic workers for strike—women refused to interrupt their care
activities due to its effect on the wellbeing of those they cared
for.

Perhaps
it is not a coincidence that recent writings about precarious labour
present a growing interest in the similarities between art and
domestic work. According to feminist theorist Marina Vishmidt, both
realms are positioned as being somehow outside wage-labour relations.
Unlike other forms of work in capitalist societies, they are not
considered to be productive and are not socially recognised via wage,
contracts and regulations. 1 In other words, both the art and care
sectors are marked by a certain ambiguity in which the distinction
between “work” and “non-work” tends to implode. In the
context of trade unionist politics this is certainly a problem—the
model of labour organising is not particularly effective in
mobilising wageless workers isolated in their kitchens, bedrooms and
homes. But perhaps this apparent incompatibility can be
conceptualised as potentiality rather than failure, directing us
towards forms of struggle constructed from the experience of unwaged
and precarious workers. So how to imagine wage struggles that are
anchored outside of conventional wage-labour relations?

One
interesting example of such political imaginaries can be found in the
1972 Wages for Housework campaign. Founded in Padua, Italy, it issued
a demand for recognition of women’s hidden social labour through
wage. As Silvia Federici writes, Wages for Housework was guided by
the understanding that a wage is not simply a paycheck but a
political means of organising society.2
Accordingly, winning a wage was not considered to be the
revolutionary goal
but a revolutionary strategy
that calls for the reorganisation of capitalist social relations and
undermines the role that is assigned to women in the capitalist
division of labour.3
Thus, instead of seeking admission into the conventional wage-labour
relations, Wages for Housework was essentially engaged with the
politics of struggling against capital rather than for it.4
This difference between for
and
against
is
the crucial element that distinguishes the Wages for Housework
campaign from the trade unionist politics of wage negotiations.
Furthermore, it is the conceptual nucleus of the political
perspective that autonomist Marxism has to offer for workers who
strive for autonomy from both the capital and the state. How then to
make sense of this political perspective in light of the art workers’
struggles against precarious labour?

Throughout
my experiences of art workers organising, I have often witnessed the
beginning of a cycle of struggle. This is a moment of making
choices—of setting priorities, articulating objectives and agreeing
on strategies. What frequently gets discussed in those situations are
questions of whether to speak from the subject position of workers or
artists; whether to start wage negotiations with particular art
institutions or engage directly with levels of political
decision-making; whether to organise in trade unions or informal
networks; and whether to remain anchored within the boundaries of the
art sector or create cross-sector alliances with other precarious
social groups. Among those reoccurring choices is one that gets
dismissed more frequently than others—the choice of developing
self-organised community economies which counteract precariousness by
sharing resources, housing and care.

I
would now like to take another look at the ambiguous position that
art and care workers seemingly share in relation to conventional
wage-labour relations. A critical engagement with this phenomenon is
often oriented at overcoming this apparent in-between status, for
example by underlining the necessity to recognise art or care workers
as workers.
However, it is also worth asking what do unwaged workers have to gain
from such resignification? After all, work is not liberation. As
Silvia Federici writes, “Work in a capitalist system is
exploitation and there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being
exploited.”5
Perhaps the dilemma of politicising the wageless in-between position
of art and care workers can be resolved in a different way? One
options could be by radicalising art and home as sites where post-
and non-capitalist practices can emerge.

The
very last time when I entered an art workers’ assembly, I ended up
joining a housing collective. Compared to the routine practice of art
workers organising, it is a completely different political project
which is based on the notion of refusing wage labour rather than
trying to improve its conditions. However, the gesture of withdrawing
from the social order that is so deeply subordinated to wage labor is
only one side of the coin and is intertwined with the politics of
transforming existing social relations. In the context of communal
living, the counter-hegemonic project of constructing other economic
realities is rooted in the realm of homemaking. This implies that the
horizon of imagining and developing alternative ways to sustain our
lives is closely linked to the fulfilment of basic needs such as
food, housing, care, etc. In the frame of communal housing
initiatives, this can include practices such as commoning property
relations and developing modes of collective ownership;
collectivising reproduction and care tasks; queering kinship
relations; and striving for food sovereignty. However, perhaps even
most importantly, the collective pursuit of economic experimentation
is connected with the laborious process of changing the economy of
our desires.

Feminist
economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham underline that in order to
fulfil the desire for other economies and other worlds, we need to
make ourselves “a condition of possibility for their emergence.”6
According to Gibson-Graham, this demands a daily rehearsal of
re-educating and convincing our bodies and intellects to adopt
fundamentally different attitudes and affective relations to the
world.7
To conceptualise art or home as potential sites for post- and
non-capitalist practices would thus require a politicisation of these
realms as spaces where the production of new subjectivities and new
economic practices takes place. In relation to art workers’
struggles against precarious labour, this could for example imply a
shift away from the aspiration to improve the consumer status of art
practitioners within capitalist economy and instead move towards
experimentation with forms of self-organisation that are built on the
desire to imagine alternatives to capitalism.

Airi Triisberg is an art worker based in Tallinn. Her activities include writing, curating and organizing. She is interested in the overlapping fields between political activism and contemporary art practices, issues related to gender and sexualities, collective working methods, self-organization, and struggles against precarious working conditions in the art field and beyond.

When
Matti Vanhanen became prime minister in 2003 he urged Finns to take
on a collective task of making babies (Finnish “talkoot”) as a solution
to declining birth rates. Vanhanen pleaded to every Finnish couple, so
that they would produce at least one child. The comment caused some
stir, but was ultimately quickly forgotten. Nowadays the same rhetoric
can be heard without anyone as much as raising an eyebrow, as seen when
president Sauli Niinistö said the same in 2013.

The
comment by the then prime minister has stayed in my mind, since I
happened to move out of Finland during that same time. I had just
graduated from high school and had accepted a place to study in a
Scottish university. Although obviously a coincidence, it did feel a
symbolic departure from the conservatism that the Vanhanen government
represented.

I
returned to Finland in 2010, perfectly in time for the True Finns
election victory. In a sense things did not feel to have gotten much
better during my absence, not at least when it comes to political
conservatism.

The
discussion on population size seems to focus on dividing people into
good and bad, to those who produce and those who do not produce. As a
result there are “too many” of certain individuals and too few of
others. Birth rates worry economists: as the population ages, there are
not enough young people working to pay the taxes. Still, I wonder if
there are actually people who are so concerned over the governmental
budget deficits as to internalise them on such a personal level as
having more children.

Yet,
what really concerns me is not governmental initiatives trying to
interfere in our personal reproduction choices while at the same time
making cuts to child support and other structural support for families.
What worries me is that concerns on population growth have a darker
side, namely the concern over racial purity. Looking at population
figures on a global scale is avoided at all costs. The fact that the
world already has more than enough humans is seen as having nothing to
do with one's own country.

In
this sense birth rates are clearly a nationalistic pursuit, even a
nationalistic tendency to try control sexuality. However, it is not as
simple as that. On the other hand, it seems that nationalism in terms of
sexuality is mandatory heterosexuality, which sets women as birthing
machines in order to get new white-skinned citizens. This means strict
gender roles, and a strong dualistic understanding of gender.

On
the other hand, when watching the work of Jaanus Samma, with Alo
Paistik, on display at Mänttä Art Festival, I cannot help but think
about the strong connection between nationalism and homosexuality. The
homoerotic images of men hunting and doing outdoor work highlights
solidarity among men and glorifies physical strength, as any far-right
group would declare. Therefore it is also not too surprising that
pictures of Vladimir Putin on a fishing trip could also be found as
decoration images for a gay club.

Homonationalism
is a term describing how certain homosexuals are perceived valuable
enough to be protected on a governmental level, thus mixing together the
government and sexuality. This is then wrapped together as “western
values”, which are then used to justify practices of racism and even
invasions into foreign countries. Yet, violence and discrimination
happening within the nation’s own borders seems somehow less relevant.
Thus, it is fair to ask how much on the side of sexual minorities
right-wing politicians truly are, despite using them to justify their
fear of Islam.

In
the end, the question is not even about homosexuality as such, but the
norms that govern us as a society. From a neoliberal and nationalist
perspective it is not surprising that we see at the same time marriage
equality laws going through, but face threats to our basic reproduction
rights, such as restrictions to abortion rights.

Queer
is in its part an attempt to separate sexuality from governmental and
commercial interests, which produce normativity in our society.
Acknowledging and questioning these norms is fundamental, if our
ultimate goal is to equally fight all sexual and gender oppression, and
not have our sexuality intrumentalised as political tools.

Collectivising a Statement | Third Space

Footnote | Grey Violet

Immigration is
constant talk about here, there, border, identity, memory, nostalgia,
new society and old society, but what actually makes the Society Old,
New or Another? What actually brings the concept of homeland into
existence? What if that homeland never existed, ceased to exist or
had never been a territorialised entity?

The very concept of
migration is based on a fundamentally repressive thought pattern
which defines life through the state and commune; through family and
friends; through workplace and local bar; and, finally, through
personality and identity, which can never be the same.It is the same
repressive structure that invented state passports from one side and
such an entity as the “artist” with their personality, story,
branded and symbolically or really sold name-image...

What makes a
situation more “immigrant”? Сhange of country? Сhange of
address book and social network account? Or, maybe, change of
professional community? Had that community ever existed? Change of
hopes? Change of fears? Change of language? To what extent has spoken
language actually changed?

“Homeland”,
“home”, “memory”—but does the very definition of “home”
makes sense—do i—or do you—have any real connection with it? If
that connection exists—does geographical distance make it lighter,
less intensive, less visible?

Consider memory not
as a bunch of layers, not as a linear book, but as a network,
permanently reconstructed, rebuilt, reinvented as an image, feeling,
narrative—“past” as never the same, past as a land being
permanently unexplored.

No migration,
immigration, emigration—no process, no force, no beginning and no
end... Just a movement of a
network, part of which is forced to be called “self”—creation
of new connections and territories within it, of losing some others,
interactions with new-old agents, here, there and whateverywhere.

* This text is part of Third Space intervention.

Grey Violet is an anarchist, text, color, etcetera from the neutral zone. It reveals itself through focusing on sabotage of the most basic socio-cultural hierarchies. It has taken part in various activities including actions of Voina group, curation of Media Impact (Queer section) and different kinds of performances, actions and text throughout radical theory and practice.